The New Dark Age

[Prefatory Note: Modified responses to questions posed by Rodrigo Craveiro, a journalist with the Brazilian newspaper, CORREIO BRAZILIENSE, on 8/29/24, addressing the concerted Israeli military operation, extending the tactics and devastation of its attack on the Gaza Strip since last October, to the occupied West Bank. Again, Washington’s silence is almost as dismaying as Israel blatant disregard of law and standards of decency.] 

1. I would like to quote you on this military operation in West Bank. How do you see that? What was the purpose?

From the outset of Israel’s response to the October 7 attack, I believed that it was being used as a pretext for ‘ethnic cleansing’ to induce massive departures of the resident Palestinian populations from the three Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), with a long undisclosed priority being systemic expulsion coupled with massive devastation of the West Bank. It should not be forgotten that when the Netanyahu coalition at the start of 2023, that is, months before the Hamas attack, took over occupation and administration of the OPT it was viewed even in Western circles as the ‘most extreme’ in Israel’s history. What made it extreme from Day One were two characteristics: the appointment of Itmar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, leaders of the far right religious Zionist parties in the Netanyahu coalition insistent on an ethnic cleansing agenda, as the chief administrators of Occupied Palestine, and the closely associated greenlighting of West Bank widespread settler violence in West Bank villages while the political leadership in Israel smiled obligingly.

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